A business and domain model for information commerce

The expansion of the Internet and its use in business and commerce has created a number of new business opportunities and a need for their supporting models. One of these opportunities may be classified as information commerce (i-commerce), a special case of electronic commerce (e-commerce) focused on the purchase and sale of information as a commodity. I-commerce may also be viewed as a special case of the trading of intangible goods. In this paper, we present a business and domain model for the emerging field of i-commerce. The model, called CIP (Customer-Intermediary-Provider), describes an information marketplace, which is a virtual environment in which buyers and sellers of information may trade information products. The purpose of the model is to clarify the issues involved in i-commerce, to identify architectural requirements of i-commerce systems and to identify the new services that are needed to support such architectures on the Internet. Such models are necessary for understanding and classifying the rapidly increasing number of information and service providers on the Internet. Indeed, the CIP model may be used to describe the functions and services of many existing and emerging Web-based services.